[AusNOG] Possibly useful device for data retention?

[Ross Wheeler]

>> 100 years? If it's anything like the WD Green drives you'll be lucky if
>> they last 2 years.
>
> Tell me more. I understood WD Greens to be aimed at the desktop market,
> where they should last fine and they are half the price or less of the
> higher-end ones. Run them 24/7 and they'll fail, give them an ordinary
> desktop's duty cycle where they spend two-thirds of their lives idle or
> off, and they should last OK...?

Most of todays "consumer" drives certainly do seem to have a fairly short 
lifetime.

Late last week, one of my oldest servers started reporting disk errors.
They're recoverable, so it's a failing-but-not-yet-gone drive.
Seagate Hawk series SCSI-2, installed early April 1997, and operating 24/7 
ever since in a FreeBSD 2.2.1 box.

I notice in their docs, they also claim 800,000 hrs MTBF, which "should" 
be 91 years. I wonder if I can put in a warranty claim, it's throwing 
errors after just under 18 years 3 months in service!